Serge Ricco, Creative Director at L'Obs

 

Serge's Top 5

Serge Ricco: I've been the Creative Director at L’Obs ("Le nouvel Observateur" was the old name) for 8 years. Before that, I was the Art Director of Télérama, a famous French cultural weekly magazine for 20 years. It’s difficult to choose between 500 covers. It’s like choosing between your children. I tried to show the different themes that gives a true picture of our magazine.


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America’s Trump | February 4 - 10, 2016

It was my first cover about Trump in 2016. From France it felt like a big circus. The idea was to incarnate it as a pop art icon.

Unfortunately, fiction has become reality. Trump is really dangerous for an art director because it makes good covers so easy!

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They Will Do 2016 | December 23, 2015 - January 6, 2016

Camélia Jordana is a french singer of Algerian origin. After the attacks of Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan, she agreed to pose as Marianne with a naked breast in front of the lens of the photographer Yann Rabanier. The dove was real and hard to keep in the letter "O"!

Who Will Kill The Other? Hollande or Valls | March 17 - 23, 2016

I liked an idea of a cover that does not cost a dollar more. It was an alternating cover printed on the same paper. If you match the two different copies you could see two different faces. Fortunately, they both have disappeared and Emmanuel Macron won the french election. 

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Thomas Piketty, Global Guru | November 20 - 26, 2014

In 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek published a hilarious cover about him. I wanted to be creative on an economic topic. The spirit of New York Magazine has always inspired us. The bank note did the rest!

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Special Issue about the Paris Photo Festival

This cover is very important because it's a tribute to Bob Delpire who died last year. 

He created the first covers of  "Nouvel Observateur" (the first name of L’ Obs) in the 60's and he created the logotype at Herb Lubalin's studio.

In the 70s he had published special large-format photos for L’Obs. We did the same thing for the Paris Photo Festival with a great pic of Melvin Sokolsky.

It is so exciting to publish today large formats in a world of smartphones!